Knuckler (14 page)

Wakefield, whose day began with an early wake-up call on the East Coast, had spent enough time in the major leagues to know this routine by the time he arrived out west at the Kingdome. He wondered why he had not simply flown to Anaheim and met the team there. He learned the answer when the coaches told him to put on workout clothes and head out to the bullpen, where he would have his inaugural throwing session with his new catcher, Mike Macfarlane. Wakefield
felt bad about this. Macfarlane had come into the clubhouse after being behind the plate for the entire loss, and now he was being asked to put his equipment on again to catch Wakefield in the bullpen. Wakefield felt this was a terrible way to meet his new batterymate and, for that matter, his new team.

What a first impression.

Two days later, he gave what he felt was a far better representation of himself.

The day after the Seattle finale, the Red Sox began a three-game set against the Angels with an 8–3 victory behind right-hander Hanson that at least temporarily stopped the bleeding. Nonetheless, like Sox officials, Wakefield knew that the injuries to the pitching staff were likely to begin having an erosive effect, if for no other reason than the fact that the staff's depth had been whittled away.
This is my chance to help.
More than anything, Wakefield hoped to give the Red Sox innings and to provide some stability to a staff that badly needed it, but the simple truth was that no one—from Sox officials and players to Wakefield himself—had the slightest clue of what to expect when he made his Red Sox debut on May 27, 1995.

Staked to a 2–0 lead in the top of the first inning, and 20 months removed from his last major league experience, Wakefield took the mound for the bottom of the first inning feeling almost exactly as he had on July 31, 1992, when he made his major league debut for the Pirates.
Just get through the first inning.
Wakefield was nervous and tight. He immediately walked the leadoff man, Tony Phillips, who promptly advanced to second base on a passed ball. Then Wakefield walked another.
Here we go again.
The Angels trimmed Boston's lead to 2–1 on a run-scoring single by first baseman J. T. Snow before a laboring Wakefield retired third baseman Eduardo Perez on a fly to right field, ending an inning during which he required 26 pitches to record three outs.

Whew.

And then, as if he had merely needed to exhale, Tim Wakefield got his groove back.

As the Red Sox slowly opened up their lead—to 4–1, 10–1, and, ul
timately, 12–1—Wakefield rhythmically carved up the Angels with one knuckler after another, his concentration rising with every pitch. This was a dramatic change from the last time he had pitched in the major leagues. When he had pitched well in Pittsburgh, Wakefield often had felt so "locked in," as he put it, that he didn't remember thinking about
anything.
He just pitched. The process became second nature.
Grip, kick, throw.
But when things had unraveled, Wakefield's mind would begin to race and he would lose focus, discipline, patience.
Why was that last knuckleball flat? How do I fix it?
He would start tinkering and changing things, as he had done throughout the miserable summer of 1994, triggering a counterproductive chain reaction that made him worse, not better.

Over his final six innings against the Angels, Wakefield threw just 64 pitches and allowed only four hits while failing to issue another walk. The Angels looked downright befuddled. By the time manager Kevin Kennedy pulled Wakefield from the game after the seventh inning—Kennedy was already looking ahead—the Red Sox were en route to a resounding 12–1 victory that built on Hanson's performance from the previous night. Wakefield left the mound feeling rejuvenated,
restored,
as if the failure in Pittsburgh and the subsequent sessions with Niekro had taken him to where he had been at the beginning.

"I think my concentration level got back to where it needed to be," he said.

Three days later, with Boston's pitching staff still in a decrepit state and Wakefield coming off a comfortable 90-pitch outing, Kennedy made a most unusual request of his new knuckleballer: the manager asked him to pitch on just two days of rest. In fact, during the game in Anaheim, Kennedy had asked Wakefield about the possibility of coming back to pitch on preposterously short rest if needed; the knuckleballer was all too eager to do it if it would help his new team. Once the affair with the Angels was fully in hand, Kennedy yanked Wakefield from the game with the idea of using him again almost immediately, this time against the A's and crafty right-hander Ron Darling on Tuesday, May 30, in Oakland. Kennedy's hope was that Wakefield
would be able to pitch approximately five innings, absorbing an ample part of the workload left behind by Sele and Eshelman. Four days into Wakefield's career as a member of the Red Sox, the team already was asking him to do the work of two men.

Picking up precisely where he left off against the Angels, and looking like a young Luke Skywalker who had just discovered the secret to mastering the Force, Wakefield systematically dissected the Athletics as if on autopilot. On a night when Kennedy hoped that Wakefield would be able to last through the fifth inning—and against the equally efficient Darling—Wakefield pitched into the eighth. All in all, Wakefield recorded 22 more outs—he pitched 7⅓ innings—and allowed only a single through the first seven innings, making great use of a fifth-inning sacrifice fly by teammate Tim Naehring that produced the game's only run and gave the Red Sox a stirring 1–0 victory.

With Wakefield and Darling matching one another in a duel of pitching proficiency, the game lasted a mere two hours, seven minutes.

Just like that, the Red Sox felt as if they had unearthed a treasure.

"That's what you call complete command of the ball game," a gushing Kennedy said of Wakefield's performance.

Of course, even assessment that missed the point.

In actuality, Wakefield had been in complete command of
two
ball games
.

Wakefield's performances in Anaheim and Oakland were merely the beginning of a run that would alter the 1995 baseball season in Boston and, for that matter, the entire course of Wakefield's career. Five days after beating the A's and Darling—this time on the far more traditional four days of rest—Wakefield made his home debut at Fenway Park as a member of the Red Sox and pitched Boston to a 2–1, complete-game, 10-inning victory over the Seattle Mariners. Five days later, on June 9, he faced the A's a second time and threw another complete game, this one a 4–1 victory. By the time the run was complete, the Red Sox had gone from 16–10 to 26–13—from being a team headed back to earth to one indisputably shooting for the moon.

In a span of just 13 days, Wakefield won four games and pitched 33⅓ innings, an
average
of 8⅓ innings per start. He allowed just two earned
runs. The Red Sox, like their resurrected pitcher, were believing fully in the wonders of the knuckleball, from the man throwing it to the man catching it to the thousands of fans in Fenway Park watching it. As the excitement built in Boston, Wakefield remained true.

Grip, kick, throw.

"I didn't know I'd have this much fun with a knuckleballer out there," catcher Mike Macfarlane said after one of the pitcher's early starts. "It was fun as hell."

Still, through it all, there was a sense that the other shoe would inevitably drop.

And it would.

Paired with the effervescent, likable, and chronically positive Macfarlane, Wakefield's improbable, career-resuscitating run with the Red Sox endured throughout much of the New England summer of 1995. Though Wakefield went three straight starts without a victory from mid to late June, he took the mound against the Detroit Tigers on June 29 with a 4–1 record and 1.72 ERA. By then, Wakefield had been all but assured a regular place in Boston's five-man rotation for the foreseeable future, and the Red Sox had fully begun to believe that they, like their riches-to-rags-to-riches knuckleballer, could ride baseball's most mystical pitch like a hot, high roller at the craps table. Their focused knuckleballer seemed to possess persuasive powers that bordered on the evangelical. Wakefield's mantra was their mantra.

Blessed are those who do not question.

Have faith.

Believe.

From June 29 through August 13, 1995, Wakefield made 10 starts for the Red Sox and won them all, a streak of truly historic proportion. Since 1936, no starting pitcher in baseball had won more than 13 starts in a row during any season; since 1960, only 14 had won more than 10. Wakefield's streak would remain the third-longest in club history and the longest since 1950, when left-hander Mel Parnell won 11 straight starts.

"He pitched absolutely lights out," Duquette said of a period during
which Wakefield posted a 1.60 ERA and became one of only 23 pitchers in history ever to start a season 14–1. "Make no mistake, he pitched us to the East Division championship. Unbelievable run and debut. It was like magic."

Indeed, the 1995 Red Sox rumbled to the American League East Division championship and an appearance in the postseason, defying all expectations and logic.

Their story, in many ways, was truly the stuff of lore.

And yet, throughout it all, there was always the sense that things eventually would go
poof.

To this day, Tim Wakefield regards the summer of 1995 as Nirvana, that time and place where mind, body, spirit, and knuckler were in complete harmony. Even compared to his meteoric rise with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1992, he regards the 1995 season as the most successful stretch of his career—a period when the game was absurdly simple for him, when pitching was a matter of
grip, kick, and throw.

And yet, baseball being baseball, there was always the knowledge that the streak would not and could not continue, and that reality had nothing to do with Wakefield or his trademark pitch.

In the wake of his performance with the Pirates in 1992, Wakefield had been permanently scarred by his success when he set a standard for himself that no pitcher could have possibly lived up to. When the Pirates overhauled their organization following the 1992 season, Wakefield had been placed in an impossible position. He was a young man still trying to adjust to unprecedented success and attention, but with no real understanding of why he was succeeding at all. The game and the world sped up on Wakefield to the point where he simply could not keep up, and his legacy in Pittsburgh eventually came crashing down around him, his career smashed in the process.
A million little pieces.

With the Red Sox in 1995, Wakefield, infused with confidence by the brothers Niekro, tried to take a far more deliberate approach by adopting the oldest baseball cliché and embracing it to the fullest: he tried to take one game at a time. Instead of focusing on the next game
or the next batter, he tried to focus only on the next pitch. He would dig his fingernails into the leather cover of the baseball, rock back, release. What happened after that, he reasoned, was beyond his control. Sometimes, standing on the mound, Wakefield could hear Niekro's voice, as if Niekro were still hovering behind him on the practice fields of Florida like a holographic Obi-Wan Kenobi, instructing Wakefield in what to do next.
Take a little off this one. Throw the next one as hard as you can.
Wakefield often seemed to be engrossed in a conversation with himself and could come off as abrupt or uncooperative. He shrugged off questions about his success, dismissed any and all talk of a winning streak, and deflected all requests for commentary to his manager, teammates, and coaches.
I just want to pitch.
The more he won, the more he simplified, the more he focused, and the more he won. Anticipating the fall that would inevitably come, he desperately tried to keep everything on even ground and prepare himself for the kind of failure that had so devastated him in Pittsburgh and beyond, so as not to experience the same unforgettable pain.

At times, it seemed, all the winning seemed to have a paradoxical effect.

The fall is only going to be that much greater.

Macfarlane was a perfect complement and mate for Wakefield, the outgoing and infectiously good-natured catcher's personality serving as the pitcher's perfect alter ego and inner child. Armed with an oversized catcher's mitt that now had become far more common for catchers working with knuckleballers, Macfarlane thoroughly embraced a challenge that many catchers ran from. Despite having never caught a knuckleball, the boyish-looking catcher welcomed the chance with unbridled enthusiasm. He said the things that Wakefield did not. Known for passionately and outwardly expressing his passions and his feelings, Macfarlane would announce every one of Wakefield's starts as if he were the ringmaster at a circus—"Freak show!" the catcher would shout throughout the Boston clubhouse—and he did so with a gleeful disposition so genuine that his teammates, particularly Wakefield, could not help but chuckle.

And Macfarlane did it all during a season in which he amassed a
whopping 26 passed balls, a total that might have been embarrassing had Macfarlane allowed it to be. That passed-ball total was the most in baseball by any catcher since 1987, when Texas Rangers catcher Geno Petralli amassed the ungodly total of 35 passed balls while catching—you guessed it—knuckleballer Charlie Hough.

When the winning streak ended in the final weeks of the 1995 regular season, Wakefield was not pitching poorly as much as he was pitching mediocre. Though he went 2–7 with a 5.60 ERA over his final 10 starts, those statistics were slightly skewed by one especially poor outing. In his final nine starts, Wakefield's ERA of 4.84 was only slightly above the league average of 4.71, but the absurd success that had defined his midsummer stretch was indisputably gone. Wakefield knew this would happen at some point because the game demanded it. He had learned that much.

For pitchers, winning requires a great deal—decent run support, good defense, more than a little luck—and Wakefield went from experiencing virtually all of it to experiencing relatively little.